The Desert King / An Affair with the Princess: The Desert King

Then he’d mentioned a future. Together. And reality had slapped her in the face. With the rush of recollections. With the realization that every second of this evening had been another undetectable maneuver of a master manipulator.

She’d groped for her resolve, said what she’d come here to say. And he’d decided it was more efficient to give up trying to coax her into submission and was now coercing her into it.

He leaned forward in his seat, magnifying his silhouette against the light radiating from the room, his face in the moonlight a hewn mask of inhuman beauty and coldness.

Then he spoke, his voice freezing her. “Now that I’ve made this clear, let me make another thing as unequivocal. This marriage is happening. That’s not up for negotiation. I’ve only called you here to discuss our terms in the deal.”

Her vision began to blotch. She inhaled a choppy stream of oxygen before it blinked out, heard her wavering whisper. “It’s another hostile takeover for you, this so-called marriage, isn’t it? You make no distinction between discussing one or the other.”

He leaned back in his seat, relieving her of a measure of his influence so that breathing turned from a struggle to a mere effort. “For once we agree. Hostile takeover just about sums it up. You’re hostile, and I am taking over.”

“You’ve got that only half right. I sure am hostile. With the best and worst of reasons. Not that you, your imminent majesty, are the essence of friendliness. As for taking over, not in this life. In any other, you can take your ‘deal’ directly to whatever devil you worship, in whatever hell you’ll end up in.”

He sat forward again, probably to make sure she saw the glint of revulsion in his eyes before he grated, “I am taking my deal to the devil I have to deal with, am walking into the hell I have to end up in. Now stop aggravating the ugliness of the initiation rites of this hellish pact and state your terms.”

She wasn’t crumbling under his onslaught. She wouldn’t let him shove her to the ground and walk all over her again.

Her scoff was still weak as she choked on his venom. “Have you gone deaf from the repeated injury of perpetually hearing only your own voice booming inside your head? I said in plain English there’ll be no deal. You need it translated to something you understand better? Mafee sufquh.”

“Lell assaf, es’sufquh mafee menha maffar. To translate—regretfully, there’s no escaping the deal, in case you no longer understand more than the rudiments of your mother tongue.”

Indignation at the dig she’d heard a thousand times infused heat into her chilled bones, steadiness in her voice. “I’m as much an American as I am a Zohaydan, even if in reverse to what I thought. So don’t play the turning-my-back-on-my-roots card.”

His lips stretched on a silent snarl. “How about the turning-your-back-on-your-family card?”

“Oh, no, not that one, either. You don’t know anything about me or about how it’s been with my parents, not in the past when there were only two, and surely not now there are four of them. You have nothing to do with any of it, so don’t you dare even have an opinion on how we all deal with it. Keep out of it and it’ll turn out fine. The only person I’m turning my back on here is you.”

His eyes narrowed, intensifying his menace. “I know far more than you so obliviously think. About you, and about what you put and are still putting your parents through. And though there’s nothing I want more than to watch you leave thinking you’ve gotten your own back, I’m not letting you walk away.”

“Aren’t you going too far into the realm of irrationality to enforce your will? To put through this ridiculous ‘deal’? You walked away from me calling me a depraved slut, if you remember. You’d make a slut your queen and the mother of your heirs?”

His gaze froze as silence stretched until it almost snapped every nerve in her body. Then he turned his face away, presenting her with the precision and power of his profile. Just when she thought he had nothing more to say, that she’d rested her case, his voice poured into the night, as deep and permeating.

“I remember one sunny day seven years ago, here in L.A. I was getting into my car when you threw yourself at me right in the middle of the street. After I pried you off me, you stalked me, did it again everywhere I went, not caring who saw your exhibitions or heard your shameless pleas, probably wanting to publicly embarrass me enough so I’d give you the chance to work on me again in private. If your memory is as intact as you claim, you surely remember what you said. Things along the lines of ‘I need you’ and ‘I’ll do anything.’ Ring a bell? You make it sound as if I was insulting you, calling you what I did. Try to put yourself in the position of an unbiased observer and tell me, how would you describe your behavior as anything other than depraved and slutty?”

Had she burned to ashes? How had she not, after he’d shriveled her up once again with the memories? Of her own condition then, her actions, his reactions?

She finally rasped, “Depraved is right. As in out of my mind. But I’m very much in it now.”

He turned back to her, his gaze the essence of ridicule. “A piece of precious advice. Drop the act. I had to tear your talons out of my flesh to make you let go. You want me with the same ferocity still.”

A surge of scalding acknowledgment had her on her feet, quaking with mortification. That he was right, that her hated hunger had never died, the weapon he’d damaged her with. That he knew. Before any defense took shape in her mind, he rose to his feet, too, slow, measured, pitiless.

“In case you’re preparing to launch into empty posturing and pretense, save it. I can feel it, coming off of you in waves. All this ‘I’d rather die than marry you’ is to goad me into giving you what you want, isn’t it? A game of pursuit? With some reluctance and dominance thrown in? Go ahead, admit it and I’ll promise to give you what you know will leave you gasping within an inch of your life with satiation, and let’s move on to something important.”

She shuddered with rage. At herself, at his unjust words and malice. Was this how people had arteries burst in their heads? She felt herself going numb, her tongue filling her mouth, swollen with the incoherent need to lash out.

Nothing came to her rescue. Nothing but, “You…bastard.”

His lips pressed together for a moment. Then they spread on a heart-wrenching parody of a smile. “It’s not me who is one.”

She almost doubled over.

She didn’t, stood there feeling as if he’d just punched through her, stared his cruelty full in the face. After all he’d done to her, she still hadn’t thought him capable of such a level of heartlessness. Her mind emptied, her heart flooded. With the acid of desperation. For something to deflect the pain with, to send it ricocheting into his black heart, to not let him have the final word. Not when it was that.

But what could be enough to answer a stab through the heart?

She shouldn’t have walked into his trap. Should have known how this would end. Shouldn’t have taken him on, shouldn’t…

Just get out of here.

She staggered around, felt the floor turning to quicksand, struggled not to sink into it.

Suddenly something sank into her—the fingers that an hour ago had barely touched her on the elbow and disrupted her balance and wrenched a response from her, that had once stripped away whatever control she’d developed before she’d met him. She wished they were violent. They were only inexorable in intent, cruel in effect.

He aborted her momentum, kept her on her feet, turned her around to meet his wolf’s eyes as they flared with antipathy. “You’re not walking out on your responsibilities like you have all your life. It’s time you behaved like the princess you regretfully are. You will honor your duties and for once be of use to others.”

“Use?” she threw at him, hating him even more for the quaver that robbed her pain of any retaliatory effect. “That’s all you think people are for, don’t you? To be used. Well, as you say, I had one use to you in the past, and damned if I’m ever going to be of any use to you again. It’s not dramatizing to say I’d rather die.”

“You think it’s any kind of life for me to be forced to make use of you? Do you think I want to marry you? The woman I found out was too depraved to be even one of my sex partners? But I will marry you. For the throne of Judar.”

Every word lodged into her with the force of an ax in the chest. And for the millionth time, the frustration, the sheer mind-con-suming confusion reverberated inside her.

Why all this revulsion? All this fluency of abuse? All she’d ever done once was lose her mind over him….

And it was there again. Like the ocean, advancing on her with its endlessness and blackness, the tide of volatility. Her vision, her emotions began to distort, to fracture, the swirling black hole she’d once been unable to exit staring at her, pulling…

No. She would not let him do this to her.

She wrenched herself from his hands, spat, “You and your throne and your Judar can go to hell.”

He seemed to expand, his hands fisting at his side. She knew that if she’d been a man of equal size he would have pulverized her.

Finally he ground out, “What about Zohayd? And your father and king? You probably care nothing if they go to hell, too, but before you consign them there, give it some thought. Think what you’ll lose, if Zohayd is dragged into civil war.”

“Civil war? What are you talking about?”

“The war that will break out in both our kingdoms if our union doesn’t come to pass.”

She stared at him as if he’d started talking a language she barely understood, shook her head. “Don’t you think you’re being far-fetched here? Zohayd is rock stable. You want to convince me that if a personal deal between you and my uncle…my fa-fa…K-King Atef falls through, Zohayd will go up in flames?”

His gaze was long and considering, the flames of his own fury banking. “So I’m being far-fetched, eh? You think anything less would make me come near you again, let alone give you access to my life, this time as my wife, to carry my name, my honor, my heirs? You won’t take my word, just as you didn’t take your adoptive parents’ or King Atef’s? When would you be convinced that our marriage is imperative? When rivers of blood run through both our kingdoms? When neighbors turn against each other, kill each other’s children and blood feuds erupt to spread devastation for centuries? When our whole prosperous region turns into another war zone that breeds anger and hunger and intolerance and spreads its infection to the rest of the world? Or would you even then say, sorry, not my business? Just because you are a woman scorned, you’d send millions, entire countries, to hell?”

The images he painted, his conviction, suffocated her. She raised her hands as if to ward off a barrage of blows. “Please…stop. I—I—God…are you telling me the truth?”

“No, I project death and destruction for millions of people because it’s fun.”

“God…” She couldn’t speak for a long moment, her throat feeling as if it were clogged with thorns. Then she looked at him through the film of moisture that manifested her dissolving control. “I didn’t know—didn’t realize the situation was anything like that. My unc—my fa…King Atef…he—he…Dammit! That medieval throwback! He said nothing like that. I know Zohayd and Judar are still tribal beneath their ultraadvanced veneers, but this is taking the entrenched stupidity of not including women in matters of state too far. He told me only that it was a political marriage, gave me the impression it was something personal between the two of you, as two monarchs. I…h-had no idea w-what was at stake…”